Don't Take Down the Wall of Separation

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Christian restraint, then, must be learned, while Jewish restraint in this respect comes with the territory (Except when the territory is Israel since its resuscitation in 1948; but Israel--like Britain, Sweden, and Holland, and unlike the United States--is not an Enlightenment construction.)

It is lately being proposed by some Jewish thinkers that the alternative to a religious presence in public places is a tendency toward paganism, vandalism, a diminution of public morality, the annihilation of ordinary expectations of decent conduct in the streets. "Separation favors paganism," Milton Himmelfarb declares, referring to the biblical view of "pagans," not the contemporary one. He means by this that irreligion fosters barbarism--a conclusion it would be dangerous to disagree with.

The famous flower children ended up as Charles Manson. "Doing one's thing" produced Milwaukee's Dahmer. "Make love, not war" brought on public licentiousness on a hugely tragic scale; promiscuity's diseases will have killed more young men and women than died in Korea and Vietnam together.

But to say that irreligion encourages savagery is not the same as asserting that separationism favors paganism. Separationism need not result in irreligion. There is, between irreligious barbarism and secularist separationism, a tertium quid.

For this I return to my childhood. I was still in grammar school when the "released time" program was instituted--an undertaking that used hours of the public-school day to send pupils to local churches for religious instruction.

As the only Jew in my class, I had no place to go, precisely because I had a place to go; but my religious instruction began after school hours, in the daily

or Hebrew school, which did not take time away from Norse myths or arithmetic and vocabulary tests. Consequently, while the others were away I sat in the classroom drawing pictures, alone with an imprisoned teacher: pointless prisoners together.

People like to say that the heder was an educational failure, and to an extent that is true. Its teaching was inefficient and often ineffective; it did not, by and large, produce scholars of Judaism. But the charge of wholesale failure misrepresents. No one who went diligently to heder after school was left unprovided for by its perspectives and its premises, however shallowly they may have been conveyed.

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